Thursday was supposed to be a relaxing night, but I got caught up working on a research project about two-sport women athletes.

My plans changed when Ira Thor asked the following question in an SID forum:

"We had a two-sport standout score a career-high 25 points in a women's basketball game last night… Earlier in her career she had 25 kills in a volleyball match.  Has anyone ever had a women's student-athlete with both 25 kills and 25 points in a volleyball/basketball career??"

I wanted to answer that question!

We don't have a complete historical database of box scores — in fact I don't even have Ira's volleyball box scores — but for the past few years we do have nearly all basketball box scores for NCAA Division III and all of the NJCAA, as well as a good chunk of volleyball box scores in the same time frame.

First, I had to write some code to run through our 67,178 women's basketball box scores and 65,143 women's volleyball box scores to find when a player scored at least 25 points in basketball or tallied 25 kills in volleyball. That wasn't too bad actually.  I found 12,805 examples in basketball and 1,263 examples in volleyball. I don't know volleyball stats that well, so it was fun to learn how rare 25 kills is for a player in one game.

Then came the fun part... how to spot when it's the same player accomplishing these feats.

The biggest challenge with comparing names is that they can be spelled inconsistently in box scores. SIDs have their own opinions about how to write names in box scores. It could be "Jade Medley" or "Medley, Jade" or "JADE MEDLEY" or "MEDLEY, J." or something else. This is hard for a computer to recognize, and I needed a way for a computer to do this because with 1,263 volleyball and 12,805 basketball games that met these thresholds, I couldn't manually scan all possibilities.

What I did was group all of those player game highs by team, and then decided to start from volleyball since it's much rarer. So team-by-team, my strategy was to throw all first and last volleyball names into a pile and make the names lower case. For example, "Kelli Johnson" and "Rachel Johnson" became "johnson kelli rachel". Now a computer could compare if any names matched either way and cut down the list of tens of thousands of possibilities down to around a hundred possible matches.

That left me to weed out a bunch of common first and last names (the most common first names were Emily, Amanda, Meredith and the most common last names were Smith, Armstrong and Johnson). I found seven NCAA Division III athletes who have done this and two NJCAA athletes.  The highlight was seeing two were at one school, Maranatha Baptist, an Independent DIII school.

Here's the final list:

Framingham St. (NCAA Division III, Massachusetts State College Athletic Conference)
Alycia Rackliffe, 29 points on February 4, 2014 vs. Fitchburg St., and 28 kills on November 1, 2014 vs. Westfield St.

Lancaster Bible (NCAA Division III, North Eastern Athletic Conference)
Lauren Heliger, 29 points on November 17, 2012 vs. Eastern, and 25 kills on September 25, 2012 vs. Cairn.

Maranatha Baptist (NCAA Division III, Association of Division III Independents)
Torey DeLozier,27 points on February 9, 2013 vs. Aurora, and 41 kills twice, once on September 29, 2012 vs. Dominican (Ill.) and also on September 24, 2011 vs. Moody Bible.
Laci Peterson, 27 points twice, once on February 15, 2014 and also on March 1, 2014 both vs. Grace Bible (Mich.), and 26 kills on September 10, 2013 vs. Concordia (Wis.).

Marshalltown Community College (NJCAA Division I, Iowa Community College Athletic Conference)
Mady Van Metre, 29 points on February 16, 2013 vs. Iowa Lakes Communication College, and 37 kills on August 25, 2012 vs. Allen County Community College.

Mitchell (NCAA Division III, New England Collegiate Conference)
Amanda Garcia, 26 points on November 19, 2013 vs. Pine Manor, and 25 kills on September 28, 2013 vs. Pratt.

Niagara County Community College (NJCAA Division III, Region 3)
Kristine Ripson, 38 points on January 24, 2013 vs. Mercyhurst North East, and 29 kills on September 22, 2012 vs. Monroe Community College.

Olivet (NCAA Division III, Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association)
Stefanie Lang, 43 points on November 15, 2013 vs. Kenyon, and 27 kills on September 26, 2014 vs. Alleghany.

Trinity (Conn.) (NCAA Division III, New England Small College Athletic Conference)
Hannah Brickley, 28 points on February 1, 2014 vs. Colby, and 25 kills twice, once on October 29, 2011 vs. Bowdoin and also on October 25, 2013 vs. Smith.

and of course the great athlete that started this research:

New Jersey City University (NCAA Division III, New Jersey Athletic Conference)
Jade Medley, 25 points on December 10, 2014 vs. Ramapo College and 25 kills on October 22, 2011 vs. City College of NY.